What If...? Introduction

It can be fun to calculate hypothetical situations which you know are
extremely unlikely in real life, but give some indication as to whether or not
such a course of action would cause a change in the way people play
the UK lottery.

Having heard of attempts around the world to buy most or all of
the ticket combinations for a draw in an attempt to win enough prizes to
make a handsome profit (this happened once in the Irish lottery for instance),
it seemed an obvious first What If...? question. Besides, I've been e-mailed on
several occasions with this very question and haven't been able to provide a
definitive answer to the question of someone buying up all 13,983,816 ticket
combinations and how this would impact the UK lottery.

In reality

In reality, to buy 14 million tickets would be a nightmare. You not only
need £14 million of course (requiring multi-millionaires or a very large
syndicate to take part), but the sheer logistics of feeding in playslips
(which only allow you to buy a maximum of 7 sets of 6 numbers at a time) would
require a team of several hundred people around the country willing to feed in
several thousand playslips each.

Of course, you'd need 2 million playslips and some computer software to print
out all the combinations in a sort of "human way" (i.e. with a random pen mark
so it doesn't look like it's done by software). Retailers probably won't
accept playslips that are entirely printed by third party computer, but
that could be an avenue worth trying - a good quality double-sided colour
printer would be needed, although you'd no doubt be breaking copyright by
reproducing playslips in this manner (and risk having entries voided by
Camelot).

It's also hard to see how the Press (and Camelot themselves) wouldn't catch
wind of all this - all the retailers and playslip feeders would have to be
paid handsomely for their work and to keep quiet about it. If the story did
break, then ticket sales would be further boosted by people thinking that
it's a bigger draw (though in reality, the majority of extra prizes would go to
the additional 14 million tickets).

What's involved

The following things happen when every ticket combination is additionally
bought for a draw:

An extra ticket wins the jackpot.

An extra 6 tickets win 5+bonus prizes.

An extra 252 tickets win 5-match prizes.

An extra 13,545 tickets win 4-match prizes.

An extra 246,820 tickets win 3-match (£10) prizes.

An extra 260,624 prizes are won in total.

Ticket sales increase by £13,983,816.

Total prize pool increases by £6.292,717.20.

Pools Fund increases by £3,824,517.20.

Jackpot prize pool increases by £1,988,748.94.

5+bonus prize pool increases by £611,922.75.

5-match prize pool increases by £382.451,72.

4-match prize pool increases by £841,339.78.

By now, you'll have realised that to make a profit when buying all the
ticket combinations, you have to rely on not sharing the higher tier prizes
(particularly the jackpot and 5+bonus prizes) with too many other tickets.
This is such a risk that it effectively rules out it ever being tried in
real life.

How it's calculated

As you can see above, the changes to the number of prizes and the prize
pools have been pre-calculated and are constant for each draw.
These changes can be used in combination with each draw's results to
calculate the exact effect to the prize structure for each draw.

There is one circumstance, of course, where there's maximum profit to be
made - where the jackpot wasn't won in the original draw. Unfortunately,
in real life this would cancel the next draw's rollover and this fact has
had to be ignored when calculating the change for each draw (there's no
easy way to compensate for a theoretical lack of a rollover).

One other factor could affect profit and that's rollovers (or
Super Draws). However, this is even riskier than usual because the
jackpot gets all the rollover/Super Draw additional funds, so to make a
profit, the jackpot has to be won outright by one of the additional ticket
combinations. However, real life attempts might concentrate on these types
of draws, so I've provided additional pages which just list the changes
to those draws.